Summer clarifies the details behind her cryptic statements from a few weeks ago, dispelling the many rumors that she’s leaving the podcast (never!), or that we’re going to start making Babylon 5 Phase II independent/fan film productions (tempting!). All she did was help out with cleaning up some of the chronology data that’ll be in “The Chronologies of Babylon 5” book that’s coming our from b5books.com.

Deep Geeking: This week, Tim and Summer talk about “The Illusion of Truth”, and the impact of propaganda, and how Sheridan’s hopes for getting their side of the story out to the people of Earth and the Earth Alliance by manipulating the ISN crew that comes on board backfire, creating the exact opposite impression that they wanted to make.

Discussion: Mike plays a B5/Gnome mashup that appeared in the Slice of SciFi Voicemail Show… Garden Gnome 5! Jeffrey affirms that Hollywood has run completely out of ideas, since they’re bringing back “The Banana Splits Show” (we just want the Danger Island segment, actually).

Tim reads some comments from the website as feedback on some of our more recent shows about the rights to Babylon 5 stories (films and books and tv specials), and the script for The Memory of Shadows; A Studio Lurker lets us know the intricacies and the hoops involved in getting permissions to print more B5 books and comics, and further cements Summer’s opinion that WB is a broken system hogtied by it’s own divisional competition rather than a healthy, efficient entertainment corporation (apparently it doesn’t really make money, as the poor TW/AOL/WB shareholders can attest).

Its great that there were professors inquiring about this episode for use in their courses. It makes a good cautionary tale. Unfortunately its also a good “how to” example and apparently some of the students went on to work in television “news”.

Re: the gunnery room in Legend of the Rangers–it wouldn’t have been as lame (or at all) if they had had the budget to do what jms originally imagined. She was supposed to have a seat and guns (kinda like in the original Star Wars I think), in the same room so she’d have a complete spherical view. See http://tinyurl.com/5bwpjz

If it was supposed to be a chair with a view similar to what Sheridan saw for the first time when leading the first fleet assault on the Shadows, that’d be a really huge difference.

Imagining that kind of 360 visual tracking system with the kind of gunner’s chair from The Last Starfighter really changes things… and the fact they didn’t have the budget to build that truly saddens me.

Paul – thanks for the link; I read through most of those posts. Interesting – I wonder, if indeed the “ball turret gunner” setup had been shown, if fans would be grousing about how much it resembled the gun turrets on the Millenium Falcon.

Gary – if Hollywood recycles everything, then I’m looking forward to the big screen adaptation of “Quark” with Simon Pegg as Quark and Keanu Reeves as Ficus.

Great job on the analysis of this episode. Tim’s point about the misdirection of the “commercial” is one I’ve always appreciated. This part of Joe’s approach made me feel a bit closer to him as a writer, in the same way as Rod Serling would answer questions sent to him. Joe has moved away from this approach, evidently, but the ISN bits are among my favorites.

I thought the weapons system in Legend of the Rangers was one of the best things it had going for it. Think Delenn was in some sort of place where she could stand and watch the battle for Earth in 360 degrees. Kind of assumed the system was an expansion on that